This article explores Yeats's “A Man Young and Old”. This series poems described conflict between a man and a woman. According to Yeats's theory of the art, people are in a perpetual conflict of opposites. Opposition determines the cycle pattern of life and ensures recursive waves of love and hate as men and women struggle toward personal collective Unity of Being. Such conflict evokes differences between person and daimon, and also between men and women. These parallel conditions suggest an analogy: man relates to his daimon as to a woman. Later, Yeats conceives the daimon not only as a woman bur as a gendered being in her own right. Gender provides a crucial key to Yeats's art, because gender is imprinted upon all temporal and spiritual reality. It is employed not only as a subject in his poetry, but as the means of fleshing out his philosophy and clothing his personal experience in a universal and comprehensible metaphor. Gender determines the way Yeats's views reality. In “A Man Young and Old”, Yeats describes a type of personality that is consummately objective-primary-solar-masculine according to his vision of archetypal phases. Although that personality is consistent throughout the sequence, there are stages of experience and insight that shift from youth through maturity to old age, as the title signifies. This personality attempts to make sense of his life through the gendered relationships that are at once the source of his lost innocence and the anchors of experience from which he gleans hard-earned insight. If there is one word that characterizes the man's perspective, it is adversarial.

• 황양미(성균관대) | Hwang, Yang Mi